Beckett's handwriting

I enjoyed Nicholas Lezard's review of the new edition of Samuel Beckett's letters ("Love, styes and stools", 21 March), but am obliged to defend Beckett's handwriting, which Lezard describes as "shocking". I can't speak for the letters seen by the editors of the book, but I once spent two happy years reading and writing about the vast Beckett manuscript archive held at the University of Reading. In those documents, at least, his hand was tiny, precise, and quite readable, usually in anthracite-shiny black ink. I liked how he wrote on loose sheets of mathematics paper, the faint grid lines familar from school exercise books, but my favourites were the originals of his "Mirlitonnades" poems, neatly and deliberately inscribed on throwaway pieces of paper - napkins, strips of newsprint, cheroot boxes. He also seemed to be an inveterate doodler; the manuscripts were often illuminated by odd little sketches, funny, spooky, often unexpectedly filthy. But always neat.Dr Peter MillsLeeds Metropolitan University

No treachery

Seumas Milne, reviewing my and David Hencke's history of the 1984 miners' strike, Marching to the Fault Line ("Scargill the cartoon", 21 March), says we "reveal that the then Labour leader [Neil Kinnock] had secret contact with the Coal Board in south Wales in an effort to maintain coal supplies to Llanwern steel works in defiance of the National Union of Mineworkers he professed to support". We reveal nothing of the kind, because it isn't true.

Kinnock was in contact with the NCB's area director, an old friend, but made no effort at all to get coal to Llanwern. A deal to do so was done by the South Wales NUM leaders, but the first Kinnock knew about it was from a (secret) letter to him from his friend telling him that Scargill had scuppered the deal. Scargill made the same mistake last week, only more crudely. In a speech he claimed, to cheers, that we had revealed a deal done by Kinnock to get coal into Llanwern and that this was "treachery". Milne also accuses us of writing contemptuously of Scargill, which we do not. He says we blame Scargill, instead of Thatcher, for the destruction of the coal industry, but we do not.Francis BeckettLondon

Klinghoffer's plight

I am grateful for Nicholas Lezard's enthusiastic review of my book The Rest Is Noise (Paperback choice, 14 March). Let me add a clarification concerning John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer, a dramatisation of the killing of Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists in 1985. Lezard notes that I fail to discuss the opera in the book and wonders whether it might be because "Richard Taruskin, a music writer whom [Ross] cites often throughout, has shamefully called for Klinghoffer to be removed from the repertoire". This is not the case. First, Taruskin never called for Klinghoffer to be removed. Instead, he voiced his approval for a decision by the Boston Symphony, in the weeks immediately following 9/11, not to perform choruses from the opera, in part because one of the choral singers lost her husband in the attacks. I didn't agree with Boston's decision, as I indicated in the New Yorker at the time, nor do I agree with Taruskin's general critique of Klinghoffer, but I can't see the episode as an instance of "political pressure" comparable to the cases I discuss in my book. The Boston Symphony is a privately supported institution; Taruskin is a musicologist expressing his ideas in a newspaper. In any case, there wasn't space in my book to write about all of Adams's works; I chose to limit my discussion almost entirely to Nixon in ChinaAlex RossNew York

Standing up for Waterstone's

Michael Holroyd (The week in books, 21 March) seems to be saying that the decline in sales of "literary" writing is due not to publishers or the book-buying public's lack of money or the media's thirst for celebrity, but to booksellers themselves. He concentrates his misleading argument on Waterstone's. I work at the Birmingham New Street branch, and we constantly promote literary writers. Just a few months back all of Ian McEwan's books were promoted. Is Holroyd confusing "literary" with "marginal"? Currently running nationally is the "Hidden Gems" promotion. As these titles are literary and marginal, I'm sure he would approve. If not, what about the books-in-translation promotion that has just ended? Holroyd also seems ignorant of the facility available to order a book for a customer if it is not on the shelves. But then the customer is strangely distant from his article. Michael CallananBirmingham

Tate modern

That Nahum Tate is now "remembered chiefly for butchering King Lear ("'Oh God, the Royal poem!!'", 21 March) is an interesting reflection on our changing cultural landscape. I confess I was unaware of his somewhat anticipatory "Bowdlerism" - or indeed that he had been poet laureate - but, as an Anglican of a certain age, I cannot recall a time when I didn't know him as a significant hymn writer and joint compiler with Nicholas Brady of the New Version of the Psalms of David.Jeremy MuldowneyYork

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